Former New Jersey governor Charles Edison: “Our governmental house is choked with litter and rubbish. It needs a thorough housecleaning from top to bottom.” Leon Henderson, chairman of the Americans for Democratic Action: “To my second-hand knowledge he [Truman] has been advised by friends that he can’t win and that he will be charged with the disintegration of the Democratic Party.” Congressman Mendel Rivers of South Carolina: “Harry Truman is a dead bird.” Every one of these quotes came from the lips of a Democrat and landed in the ears of potential donors. How could the party raise money if insiders and would-be donors felt that the candidate had no chance?
Even in Truman’s own Jackson County, Missouri, voters had turned against him. “My brother Vivian . . . told me all about the situation politically in my home county,” Truman recorded in his diary. “I don’t see how it can be so bad—but it is.” According to the latest numbers from pollster Elmo Roper, 64 percent of the American electorate believed Thomas Dewey would be the next president, compared with 27 percent for Truman.
In late June, one Democratic Party donor—Thomas Buchanan of the Buchanan, Wallover & Barrickman law firm in Beaver, Pennsylvania—had sent in a $100 check with a letter that put the Democrats’ position into perspective. “I would like to take this opportunity to state that the party is in bad condition, particularly because we have a weak candidate and no clear policy which we can pursue . . . It is not easy to contribute to a campaign which under those circumstances has no possible chance of success.”
In the White House on the night of July 22, the gloom was palpable. When asked who might serve as finance chairman, no one stepped forward. Truman knew morale among his staff was ebbing fast. It would be an uphill battle to establish his legitimacy, given that he had not been elected to the presidency in the first place. “The greatest ambition Harry Truman had was to get elected in his own right,” Clark Clifford later recalled. “Every president who comes in as Vice President has this feeling. Truman felt it especially because he had been so criticized and deprecated.”
The president decided it was time for a pep talk. “We are going to win,” he told those assembled in the White House that night. “I expect to travel all over the country and talk at every whistle-stop”—alluding to his successful speaking tour back in June. “We are going to be on the road most of the time from Labor Day to the end of the campaign. It’s going to be tough on everybody, but that’s the way it’s got to be. I know I can take it. I’m only afraid that I’ll kill some of my staff—and I like you all very much and I don’t want to do that.”
Around this time, Truman met with members of the Democratic National Committee in the East Room of the White House, to talk over the campaign itinerary.
“The situation isn’t as bad as the newspapers make it look,” Truman said. “It is my intention to go into every county in the United States if possible. I want to see the people. This is the only way to answer the Republicans.”
Outwardly, Truman was ever the optimist. But he knew the challenges he faced. “It’s all so futile,” he wrote his sister. “Dewey, Wallace, the cockeyed Southerners, and then if I win—which I’m afraid I will—I’ll probably have a Russian war on my hands. Two wars are enough for anybody and I’ve had two [in the European and Pacific theaters of World War II].”
His goal was to see the people, to explore the places where candidates typically did not go, and to talk to voters face-to-face from the back of a train car. The more places he ventured, the more people he could attempt to woo, and in the process, he could share the magic of the American presidency with everyday Americans. “I’m going to make it a rip-snorting, back-platform campaign to what Taft calls all the whistle stops, but I call them the heart of America,” he was quoted as saying in the summer of 1948. “When they count the whistle stops’ votes, Taft may be in for a big surprise. I think the whistle stops will make the difference between victory and defeat.”
Campaigns are about ideas—but also about the machinery to communicate them. Truman had surrounded himself with a ragtag group of advisers who came mostly from legal backgrounds and were like-minded in their desire to continue the legacy of FDR’s New Deal. For months, these advisers had formed a think tank that met on Monday nights in the apartment of Oscar Ewing in the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC. Ewing was a Harvard Law man and, until a year earlier, vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and his group consisted of seven or eight men, all with different areas of expertise, from civil rights to economics.
“We would meet at six o’clock for dinner,” Ewing recalled. “My secretary would call all the members beforehand to find out if they were coming and what they would like for dinner.” On most nights, steak and potatoes were on the menu. “I was their link with the President,” recorded Clark Clifford, the rising star of the bunch.
In 1948 no one had the president’s ear on political issues as much as Clifford, whose circuitous path to the White House was as surprising as Truman’s. Clifford had been a trial lawyer in St. Louis when he joined the US Navy during the war. A friend of his, James K. Vardaman Jr., was a naval aide to Truman and was going on leave. Clifford ended up filling in for Vardaman at the end of the war,
